LensX Lasers nabs $22M for eye surgery lasers

LensX Lasers, a maker of surgical lasers used to repair cataracts, has brought in $22.36 million in a second round of funding from Versant Ventures, InterWest Partners and SV Life Sciences. Based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., the company was founded by the same team as similar startup IntraLase, which was bought by Abbott Medical Optics for $808 million in 2007.… Continue Reading

Confirmed: Skype ready for the iPhone, Blackberry

The speculation, teasing, and waiting is over. Just as GigaOm predicted, Skype, the VoIP client that lets users make phone calls through the internet, is coming to the iPhone and Blackberry. News of Skype’s smartphone ambitions was released going into this week’s mobile-centric CTIA conference in Las Vegas. According to the Wall Street Journal, the VoIP client is due on the iPhone and iPod Touch as early as Tuesday, with the Blackberry version due in … Continue Reading

The Pirate Bay adds file sharing to Facebook

The Pirate Bay is setting its sails toward Facebook. The Swedish peer-to-peer file sharing site now offers a link allowing users to share their downloads on the popular social networking site. Though broadcasting online activity is common for Facebook users, The Pirate Bay’s newest feature could prove controversial by identifying those who share copyrighted material.

The link works just like any other social media sharing tool. Pirate Bay users looking to download a torrent (i.e., … Continue Reading

CRV raises $320M — proves not all venture capital has dried up

Charles River Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in web companies like Twitter, but also software and networking companies such as BigBand Networks and Netezza, has raised $320 million in fresh money.

The new fund, CRV’s 14th, shows that some venture capital firms are still able to raise money — even as many of their peers are struggling and being forced to throw in the towel (many are essentially “walking dead,” with their … Continue Reading

Pliant Technology raises $15 million for enterprise flash drives

Pliant Technology has raised $15 million in a third round of funding to continue making enterprise flash drives.

These drives, which use flash memory chips, can store data permanently. Essentially, they serve as fast and energy efficient external storage devices for data centers. The flash drives have fast input-output performance and are more energy efficient than standard hard disk drives, the company claims.

Based in Milpitas, Calif., Pliant plans to use the money to increase … Continue Reading

Roundup: Facebook nears 200M users and seeks loans, Disney joins Hulu, and more

updated
Here’s the latest action:

GamesBeat videos — Check out our videos from last week’s game conference.

Facebook nears 200 million users — The New York Times has a profile of Facebook as it struggles with users angry about its redesign. And it looks like Facebook is looking to raise new debt to replace a $100 million line of credit, reports Businessweek. Here’s our earlier story about the line of credit.

A heist hits 103 … Continue Reading

Author Clara Shih on the Facebook Era, and what it means for businesses

Clara Shih, creator of the Faceforce (now Faceconnector) application and Director of Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy at Salesforce.com, is launching her new book The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff (Prentice Hall) on Monday.

Everyone seems to have a Facebook profile nowadays, but Shih draws upon her experience creating a pioneering business application for Facebook (plus plenty of other research) to … Continue Reading

Social search startup Aardvark hires search and mobile experts, building iPhone app

Aardvark began opening its social search engine to more users earlier this month, and now the ambitious company is starting to reveal more of its future plans. It’s bulking up its Google-heavy technical team with Sameer Paranjpye, the Director of Yahoo’s grid computing group and a founding member of the Hadoop project. It’s also taking aim at the mobile market, hiring on Ben Keighran, the founder of mobile messaging service BluePulse. I caught up with … Continue Reading

Cloud Manifesto rubs Microsoft the wrong way

News of an “open cloud manifesto” has irked Microsoft and left a number of other companies scratching their heads. The document, which won’t be published until Monday aspires to set standards for cloud computing, an area in which many big tech companies are heavily invested, Microsoft included.

Word of the manifesto came out yesterday, when Reuven Cohen of cloud computing startup Enomaly wrote a blog post announcing the document. Many of the details won’t be … Continue Reading

After trying it out, I have a good feeling about Hunch

I am an extremely indecisive person. This sometimes frustrates other people, but it frustrates me even more because I absolutely hate wasting time. And being indecisive means I sit there thinking about decisions for far too long. Hunch, a new startup that helps you make decisions, offers a potential solution.

While the idea of a startup that helps you make decisions may sound either boring or completely too complicated to actually work, I’ve been playing … Continue Reading

New Home-Account site counters mortgage crisis with lending intelligence

Home-Account has launched a brand new site to help homeowners locate and take advantage of the best loan and mortgage rates available. Based in San Francisco, the company is couching itself as a useful tool for even casual users amid the recession and lending panic.

It’s designed to reach out to people who have had trouble qualifying for lower mortgage rates. And since it refused to take any money from the $11 trillion mortgage industry, … Continue Reading

Thumbplay wrangles $6M for mobile content distribution

Thumbplay, provider of ringtones, wallpapers, games and other content specifically tailored to mobile phones, announced that it brought in $6 million in a sixth round of funding to cushion its business against the downturn. Based in New York, the company says that with the funds, it should find itself poised to expand rapidly once the slump ends sometime next year.

Not that Thumplay isn’t already pretty well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that … Continue Reading

Lifefactory gets seeded for green baby products

Lifefactory, the Sausalito, Calif.-based company that makes green consumer products for infants — primarily, environmentally-safe baby bottles for now — says it raised $750,000 in seed funds from Greenhouse Capital Partners. Before now, the company, formerly known as Babylife, depended on contributions from family and friends.

Lifefactory sells its product through about 500 retail stores and online vendors in the U.S., Canada and Europe — including Nordstrom, Gap and Amazon.… Continue Reading

Ripple TV raises $4M more for in-store television

Ripple TV, which places digital television displays inside stores to deliver targeted advertising, has raised $4 million in new funding.

El Segundo, Calif.-based Ripple is one of a host of companies behind the televisions you see in coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, and elsewhere. Ripple says it plays a mix of national news, sports, and local weather, combined with (of course) targeted ads in locations such as like Borders, Noah’s Bagels, The Coffee Bean and Tea … Continue Reading

Microsoft makes an ad for people who were going to buy a PC anyway

By now, you’ve probably seen Microsoft’s new “Not cool enough to be a Mac person” ad. (If not, I’ve embedded it below.) On the face of it, it looks like a decent ad. It plays on the one thing that will catch people’s attention in a down economy: price. But if you stop to think about it, the ad is kind of pointless, because it’s targeting people who were going to get a PC anyway.… Continue Reading

Intel's Larrabee graphics processor draws a crowd at Game Developers Conference

Intel will be launching its Larrabee chip next year — a chip that will live or die depending on how popular it is with game developers.  Which is why it saw some serious discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today.

Mike Abrash, founder of RAD Game Tools, which makes video game development tools, took to the stage to pitch the chip to the audience. The chip is a hybrid of a  microprocessor … Continue Reading

Apple and AT&T hope suckers will clear out iPhone 3G inventory

Allow me for a second to call anyone who doesn’t read sites like this one a sucker.

You see, if you are reading, you know that it’s looking more and more likely every day that a new version of the iPhone will launch in the next few months. Yet, Apple and AT&T make no mention of that when offering “deals” and expanding the options when it comes to buying the current iPhone 3G. They need … Continue Reading

Capital Factory's Joshua Baer on incubating startups in Austin

Silicon Valley may have the most established and well-known startup incubator in the form of Y Combinator, but other areas are joining in, with TechStars in Boulder, Colo., Launchbox Digital in Washington, D.C., and Start@Spark in Boston, Mass. — and Austin, Texas is getting into the game with Capital Factory.

Applications are now open for its first batch of startups; the firm says it will be selecting 10 finalists, then narrowing the list down to … Continue Reading

Roundup: Google's layoffs, Pick Your Five's popularity, and more

Here’s the latest (layoff heavy) action:

Google lays off 200 employees — Most of the cuts are happening in the sales and marketing departments, where Google has over-invested.

Pick Your Five application surges on Facebook — The app from LivingSocial, which asks you to list your five favorite movies, books, and so on, has grown to more than 6 million users since launching a week ago.

IBM laying off 5,000 people — Many of those … Continue Reading

Music startup imeem making money, not dying unless the labels kill it

Sure, the music industry — including music startups — are having trouble coming up with significant online music business models, but recent rumors circulating about imeem‘s money problems appear to be exaggerated. The San Francisco company, which lets users create and share streaming song playlists, has been reportedly running out of money, especially because of how much it has to pay for music licensing deals it has with record labels.

Imeem isn’t commenting on finances. … Continue Reading